Teacher's read on news, developments, and blogs.

October 2006 Archives

Mr. AB of From the TFA Trenches finds that October is a long, long month for teachers. There's week upon week without a vacation, culminating in Halloween, which tends to awaken innate witching tendancies in even the best students. So to keep himself going, Mr. AB has been focusing on the progress he's making with his 4th and 5th graders: Every week we take a timed math facts test, 100 problems in 5 minutes. 4th and 5th graders should be working on multiplication and division, but this year we started on subtraction. Even at that, only 4 students passed the ...

Graycie of Today's Homework, still in a state of disbelief, tells how her seniors her were taken out of class for an hour for a presentation by a company that sells class rings and other commemorative trinkets and clothing items: Now, I know that kids want stuff. And if their parents can afford it, fine. And if they earn the money themselves and choose to spend it on this sort of gewgaws, also fine. But. Don't make time during school class time to pack them into the cafeteria and show them slick catalogs and fancy power-point shows of all the ...

After an exercise on verb tenses in which a number of her students wrote (among other things) that the past participle of freeze is "froozen," Jules the Crazy of Mildly Melancholy finds herself becoming increasingly frustrated with her classand herself: FINE, none of them are actually stupid or dumb. Gah, I know I can't say that and that I'm going to hell for even thinking it. I don't really believe they're idiots. Senseless goofs, some of them, yes. LOTS of them are really low level and that makes me very nervous, because I really don't know if anything I do...

Mei Flower offers a painfully honest reaction to the recent spat of shootings in schools: Just so you know, I am TERRIFIED about the number of school shootings that have occurred in the last few weeks. Like, I don't even want to go to school, because someone might shoot me. In her post, she decries a culture that she sees as growing increasingly accepting of the idea of students bringing weapons to schools, and she offers some stern child-raising tips. Among them: “No video games. Of any kind.” I believe these things have desensitized kids to the point that they ...